


Chasing Fraser

by Skud



Category: due South
Genre: F/M, Genderfuck, Lesbian Character, Pre-Het, Queer Het, flashfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-05-24
Updated: 2005-05-24
Packaged: 2017-10-06 03:18:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/49093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skud/pseuds/Skud
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"What'd I tell you?  She just needs the right guy.  All every woman reallywants, be it mother, senator, nun, is some serious deep dicking."  -- Banky, "Chasing Amy"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chasing Fraser

**Author's Note:**

> For the ds_flashfiction "Genderfuck" challenge. Beta by sjkasabi.

Ray slammed the door of the cubicle shut and leaned against it, knocking her head against the particleboard, clunk clunk clunk. This was not good. This was _so_ not good. _Clunk_.

"You okay in there, Ray?"

"Yeah, Frannie, I'm fine."

"`Cause you don't sound fine."

Of course she did not fucking sound fine, but she wasn't going to tell Frannie why. As if she'd understand. It was just... Ray used to think she knew where she stood, she had this life, Stella, a future, a _present_, and the next minute, bam, no Stella, no life, all she's got is a turtle and an undercover job and... a Mountie.

Which, don't get her wrong, Fraser's great. Weird, but great, and that's kind of the problem. Because she had it sorted out, she had this box marked "Ray" and she'd put all this stuff in it, and that box was an _investment_. And this was like the Great Ray Crash of 1997.

See, she'd been saving up pennies since she was twelve, when she was all teeth and elbows and grazed knees and Stella was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen. Calling herself Ray, _ching_, because nobody could be cool with a name like Raelene and anyway it fit her about as well as that pink thing they'd made her wear to her cousin Paulie's wedding, which is to say it made her skin itch. The haircut that had made her mother cry and her dad clench his fists and storm out to the garage, _ching_. Ditching Mandy Grabowicz's pajama party and sneaking in to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show for the third time, _ching_. Sitting next to Stella in history class, glaring at her Gold Coast boyfriends across the cafeteria, trying to partner up with her for gym, stealing glances afterwards in the locker room, _ching ching ching_.

And then they'd gone to see _Jaws_ together, and Stella had screamed and hidden her face against Ray's shoulder, and grabbed her arm, and Ray had held her hand for the rest of the movie. In the foyer afterwards, Joey Hartman, who was on the football team, had come up to Stella and asked her why she was hanging out with "that lezzie Kowalski" and Ray felt herself turning to dust inside, but Stella had snapped, "Because I like her," and suddenly the world was a new place.

Then there were the grown-up investments, after Ray somehow scraped into UIC and Stella went to Northwestern and started talking about patriarchy and equal rights and sisterhood. She'd been defiantly proud when Ray had ridden her motorcycle over to meet her at the women's center and stay in her dorm room. But Ray'd ditched college in the end, decided to be a cop, and when her dad had said "not under my roof" she'd moved out, got a place with Stella, and was it any wonder she and her dad didn't talk any more? Her mom and Stella got along, though -- talked on the phone, sent Christmas cards.

The Academy had been a rough lesson, she'd had to fight harder than the rest of them just to get through, and no matter how hard she tried she was never going to be one of the boys. But she made it out the other end and if she'd been slammed into the mat harder at least it meant she'd learnt to fight back. She was pretty sure she was a good cop, whatever that meant, even if she did find centrefolds ripped out of Playboy stuck on her locker with "LICK THIS DYKE" scrawled across them in thick black marker.

She hadn't gone out with the guys much, liked them even less when they'd had a few beers, but her first sergeant had been a good guy and she'd gone round to his place a a couple of times, met his wife, sat at their kitchen table eating meatloaf while the kids screamed. And when she came home tired and hurting, Stella'd been there, getting up from her desk when Ray came in the door and getting in the shower with her to wash off the day's dirt.

And then it'd been Stella and law school and Stella and walking the beat every night and Stella and Stella and Stella. Ray had made it to detective and Stella made junior partner and held dinner parties for her friends from the Feminist Legal Network and Ray gave in to the inevitable and joined the CPD Gay and Lesbian Liaison Committee, which would've been a much better idea if there'd been less press releases and more stopping people from getting beat up, but on the whole things seemed pretty good and Ray thought they were cruising along just fine, until Stella had said, "Ray, I can't do this any more," and Ray's world fell apart.

Stella got the fancy cappucino machine and the cupboard full of Celestial Seasonings that she only kept for their friends, and all the friends too. Ray got the terrarium and the turtle and the CD player, which had been hers to start with, actually. There were no secrets from the 19th precinct now Stella was working for the State's attorney's office, and half the station had seemed sympathetic, but the other half had acted like assholes about it, and Ray was glad when her Lieu called her into his office and told her about the undercover gig.

So here she was, and it was possibly the stupidest undercover assignment ever, because any idiot could see that skinny blonde Polish dyke did not equal snappy-dressing Italian guy. Those assholes from IA had been completely thrown by it, even before she'd started with the happy faces thing. But what the hell, the guys at the 27 were mostly cool, except for Dewey, and Ray'd been dealing with his sort for years. Elaine'd acted kind of funny around her when she'd started, turning away as if she kept expecting Ray to hit on her, or maybe just because she wasn't really Vecchio, but Frannie was cool, Welsh was cool, and after he'd finished with the putty sandwiches and chest measuring, Fraser'd been cool too.

The weird thing about undercover was that you had to take that box, that box marked Ray, and you put it aside for a bit. And she'd been pretty happy to do that, because the box was a mess, all shaken up, with a great big emptiness there where Stella should've been, and borrowing someone else's life for a bit seemed like a good idea. But the thing was, the box was still _there_, just off to one side.

And _that_ was why Fraser was such a problem. Apart from his tendency to jump off of buildings and have unarmed chats with gunmen, which, okay, those were problems too, but Ray had come to almost feel fond of those problems compared to this enormous looming disaster. It was like that sword that guy had over his head, just hanging there by a thread, and any minute that thread would snap and Ray would be _fucked_.

Which was why she was locked in a cubicle in the ladies' room at the station, banging her head against the door as if it might knock some sense into her.

"Ray?"

Ray's head came up from against the door so fast she almost got whiplash. "Fraser, what are you doing in here?"

"Francesca said you were, ah, upset."

"Nah, I'm fine." Ray rustled the toilet paper and flushed, then stepped out of the cubicle, playing it cool. _What, you never seen a girl who needed to pee before?_ Sink, water, soap. She wiped her hands on her jeans and said, "I'm good to go."

Fraser did that eyebrow thing, and _fuck_, she should not be thinking that was kind of cute, because it was freaking annoying, and it meant he didn't believe her, but he wasn't going to say anything until she snapped and told him. And she wasn't going to do that, so she pushed past him out into the bullpen and by the time Fraser had caught up, she was sitting with her feet on the desk, manila file folder open across her lap, chewing on a toothpick.

"So, who do you like for the Petroski Imports holdup?" she said, and they were off. The old duet, the well oiled machine, and as long as she kept her mind on catching bad guys and off the fact that she was getting revved up over her _partner_ who just happened to have a _penis_, everything would be just fine.

They made it through another five hours of driving around following up leads and having the sort of conversations that bounced back and forth and sometimes round in circles, and Fraser stopped looking at her as if he was trying to see inside her head, and started looking at her like he normally did. And if that look felt like it was only just this side of flirting, well, that was probably just Ray's over-active imagination. She shoved the thought down, way down, and shoved a tape into the deck at the same time. The Pretenders blared out, she stepped on the gas, and they were off to Al Petroski's warehouse where they found Al Petroski's wife and Al Petroski's brother with plane tickets in their hands, and that was that.

It wasn't til they'd taken down their statements and thrown the Petroski file on the paperwork pile to be dealt with later and gone out for Chinese and Ray had dropped Fraser off at the consulate that the Pretenders had clicked off at the end of the tape for something like the third time. She didn't turn it over, but just sat drumming on the steering wheel and let all those crazy ideas come flooding back in.

Fraser. Her and Fraser. She couldn't believe she was even thinking about it, and the cringe at the thought of them as some kind of Leave it to Beaver white picket fence couple was enough to propel her from the parking lot up to her apartment. One point nine kids and a house in the suburbs. Fuck, no. What was _wrong_ with her?

Right, number one, you're gay. You know it, everyone else knows it. Ray grabbed a beer from the fridge and slammed the door shut. Number two, _he's_ gay. He's practically a Tom of Finland poster, not to mention the way he acts around women. She didn't have to want to get into his stupid puffy pants to notice how he was only ever polite to the women who threw themselves at him, never actually _interested_. Well, except that one time with the bounty hunter, and she'd actually been pretty hot in a tshirt-jeans-holster kind of way. The fact that this got Ray's hopes up was just another reason why Ray needed to... fuck, she didn't even know.

Maybe she should go out again, head down to Lulu's, have a few beers, a few games of pool, and maybe when Julie behind the bar winked at her and asked about her handcuffs, this time she'd take her up on her offer, go back to her place...

Nah. Ray knew she wasn't going to, because if she was going to do that she would've done it already, instead of kicking her boots off and changing into sweat pants and settling back on the sofa. She pounded buttons on the remote til she found hockey, a repeat, but she watched it anyway. Yeah, just another one of those nights, at home alone with a beer in one hand and the other sliding down inside the waistband of her boxers, half watching the game and half thinking, maybe it wouldn't be so bad, just tossing that box aside, blowing the whole twenty-plus years of investment away, getting used to the idea of a partner with all those different parts and the different things they could do with them. She was definitely unhinged. But she shut her eyes and there was no investment, there were no complications, no undercover gig no Stella no explaining to her parents, just Fraser and the sound of hockey and Fraser and the cool glass on her lips as she raised the beer to drink and Fraser and Fraser and Fraser and her fingers rubbing at the warm slick mess between her legs.


End file.
